Securing and stabilizing the Vera by taking it off the grid

Attached is the undo script.

To use it, upload to vera and do

chmod +x UnModVera.sh ./UnModVera.sh

Thanks for the undo script!

Things are running fine, but this test unit is lightly loaded, so Iā€™ll add some devices over the next few days to make the test more useful.

FYI, ALTUI shows a Z-Wave heal occured at 1:00AM today. Iā€™ll keep an eye on this.

Interesting that you still have a nightly heal. I had a luup reload at 1am this morning due to the daylight saving time change and I was expecting it. The luup engine does not like time changes. I have gotten to the point of wondering if it actually also reloads when there is an ntp time adjustmentā€¦
This is such a poor design. Imagine a plane rebooting its engine and instruments mid air because its clock time drifted or because it lost communication with its black boxā€¦ This is exactly what the vera does. Why would one allow a peripheral function in your software to trigger a full reboot of the system?

[quote=ā€œHSD99, post:122, topic:199140ā€]Thanks for the undo script!

Things are running fine, but this test unit is lightly loaded, so Iā€™ll add some devices over the next few days to make the test more useful.

FYI, ALTUI shows a Z-Wave heal occured at 1:00AM today. Iā€™ll keep an eye on this.[/quote]

Let me know how things are going. I am still not seeing any nightly heal on my unit. I don?t know how it got disabled. It might be in the zwave stick with something I did with another controller but I thought it was triggered by the controller and not by the zwave chip. After the reboot of the 1st second of the month, I have not had any reload. I have since done some more tweaking of the service LED behavior so it better follows the luup engine status. I also upgraded all the non kernel packages of OpenWRT on my unit which include lighttpd, which is the webserver, OpenSSL, busybox and lua libraries. It took some tweaking (symbolic links) of the library files. The Vera Plus is running on a version of OpenWRT which officially does not support it?s CPU (MT7621ST). It is supposed to support the older CPU of the vera edge MT7620 but I guess they are similar enough that they can share the same packages. The kernel is very oldā€¦

It still shows a nightly heat at 1:00AM. Does it log the start or the end of the heal? Iā€™m heading out of the country on business and wonā€™t be able to play around with this for a couple of weeks.

It looks like it marks the startā€¦ I can?t imagine it finish every night at the same time.
I am on business travel overseas myself.
I played around with a second test unit and found out that the log rotation is a very large contributor to the reloads either by running out of memory while rotating logs or from the script itself calling for a reload when the rotation fails or when it lost its network monitor.

Hi rafale,
i notice that you do all your external integration (Alexa, Sonos, etc.) through either HA or OpenLuup. For those of us that may not want to roll out multiple systems and only want something like the native Alexa integration, do you know where in the scripts you modified MIOS hid those settings?

Actually the Alexa integration may still work after my mod. The sonos one for sure does. I am isolating my vera from the internet only through my firewall and only one way. Meaning nothing on the internet can initiate a call to the vera but the vera can reach the internet because of the event server problem I described previously.

All the local integrations like sonos work for sure. Alexa is going through the habridge at the point for me and I don?t know whether it relies on the mios server (cloud to cloud, Alexa device ->amazon server ->mios API server or ra sever->vera) or whether it connects directly to the amazon server from the unit. If it does call the mios servers there can be many:
The MIOS_Rest_api maybe one, the cmh_ra+tunnels_manager would be the other (remote access tunnel). You could then delete these two files before running the script.

Iā€™ll check those files. i ran the script and the native alexa stopped working. i ran the undo script and everything was back to normal. it must rely on the MIOS servers for some of the integration. THanks for providing all this!

After a week just got a luup reload corresponding to the time of a daily zwave data backup triggered by my remote server. I am guessing that it either locked up the LuaUPnP for too long or that the system ran out of memory while doing it. I am going to try increasing the cache memory cache dump frequency.

I apologize for this as I am sure you are aware of this and probably has been discussed in this thread but just finding this out about this is a little depressing as I do want true internet independence.
Apparently our Veraā€™s do not have a built in clock and thus can not schedule any automation when it is not on line.
As I would like to create some automation that is internet independent, I was just wondering how you guys are overcoming this?

[quote=ā€œJamr, post:131, topic:199140ā€]I apologize for this as I am sure you are aware of this and probably has been discussed in this thread but just finding this out about this is a little depressing as I do want true internet independence.
Apparently our Veraā€™s do not have a built in clock and thus can not schedule any automation when it is not on line.
As I would like to create some automation that is internet independent, I was just wondering how you guys are overcoming this?[/quote]

No need to apologize. I may even include this in my mod script but I did this such a long time agoā€¦

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=33038.0

The vera (re)sets the time 5 times everytime it boots as I explained in this thread

http://forum.micasaverde.com/index.php?topic=108394.0

Going on 9th day without a Luup reload. I think the only unwanted luup reloads left are the time change and 1st of the month and zwave related ones.

And oddly I am also not seeing any nightly heal for the past month which is making my zwave network very happy and stable. I still donā€™t know how I disabled it though.

Still seeing the nightly heal. I wonder whatā€™s different?

One thing I am speculating on the nightly heal:

My vera is a secondary controller on my network. Because of the HUBZB stick I am using with home-assistant, which I believe the firmware is preventing from being a secondary, I monkeyed around the network (with primary shifts) to have home-assistant/openzwave as the unique primary and SUC/SIS. (I have 3 controllers on my network). When I loaded home-assistant, I set it up with autoheal disabled around the date it stopped the nightly heal. This may have sent a signal to the entire network including the vera.

I was convinced that the nightly heal was a function called by the luup engine and not self driven by the zwave chip but I might be wrong. It could be also that my previous nightly heals were triggered by home assistant and that I had no vera caused nightly heal since it was a set as a secondary.

Looking through the forum, I found a number of posts suggesting that the heal is now driven by the Z-Wave co-processor. This would align with your scenario where your primary controller has possibly told the secondary controllers not to perform the heal.

It seems odd that the Z-Wave co-processor would be time-of-day aware.

Yes, that would be very interesting as I donā€™t know how that zwave radio chip would know the time.

I donā€™t know how much longer the new ownership will take before releasing UI8 and luup engine but in the meantime, I now have a reasonably stable system which required a lot of work and task/plugin and automation offloading/disabling.

We should ask @amg0 as ALTUI is what reports the heal and allows you to perform one on demand. He must have better knowledge of the where and how heals occur.

Rather than a time-aware Z-Wave chip, it seems more likely that the heal is a built-in function of the Z-Wave co-processor, but that it must be triggered by a command from the host.

[quote=ā€œHSD99, post:138, topic:199140ā€]We should ask @amg0 as ALTUI is what reports the heal and allows you to perform one on demand. He must have better knowledge of the where and how heals occur.

Rather than a time-aware Z-Wave chip, it seems more likely that the heal is a built-in function of the Z-Wave co-processor, but that it must be triggered by a command from the host.[/quote]
There is no control of the heal I am aware of now.
Note that the zwave device ( usually device 1 ) supports a up plan action called HealNetowrk with some parameters, that may be a way to trigger Heal but I have not tried and think I remember reading that with newer zwave firmware the heal was not controllable any more.

Thanks amg0. When you mentioned newer firmware, I suppose you are referring to the vera firmware because all other controllers I have (ZWay and home assistant) both still control the nightly heal regardless of the zwave firmware.

I am fairly certain that I have not had any nightly heal in weeks. It used to be very noticeable when it was healing as I had crazy lags at hours I am still awake. I have triggered a manual heal in the past on the vera which left me with 5 devices showing undetected (while still working perfectly) so I am really not keen on doing a vera heal.